Most large schools assign same-aged children into groups, where
they’re all taught the same curriculum. We justify this system of “grades” by
claiming that it helps to prevent inequities in size and strength, or that it
promotes efficient teaching because those children will tend to have similar
capabilities.It also is argued
that system helps with “socialization”—a process in which the pupils learn and
share similar outlooks, opinions, and values.Surely this process should help them to improve their mutual
understanding (if only to the extent to which it gets them to think in more
similar ways).

However, a different view of this suggests that age-based
segregation might actually retard our children’s development:

A new class of 6-year-old children will soon begin to share
similar ways to think and behave.Then, next year, when they are 7 years old, most of those pupils will
still remain in that group—and thus will tend to perpetuate those same patterns
of activity. The next year, they will be 8-year-olds, but will continue to
share many attitudes, values, and cognitive strategies.So as those children proceed through
their K-12 grades, large portions of their ways to think will remain much like
those of 6-year-olds!

Here’s an example that shows this persistence of infantile
attitudes: consider that a typical graduate of our schools can recount great
numbers of anecdotes about hundreds of actors, athletes, fashion models, and
other so-called ‘celebrities’—whereas very few of our modern adults can name
even a single philosopher, scientist, or scholar.Our age-based system of education does not appear to instill
our kids with the qualities that we profess to admire.
(Memo 3 will talk more about the importance of how children select their models
and mentors).

Citizen:
You seem intent to sacrifice the carefree years of childhood, and to fill them
instead only with ways to advance their intellectual development.But intelligence is not the only thing
that makes our lives worth living: what about love and companionship? Surely it
is important for children to have friends who share many common interests.

Of course, the classroom is not the whole of life: children can
also learn from older acquaintances, including their parents, teachers, and
other mentors.And we certainly
don’t want to see young minds being hurt by too much competitive anxiety.Still, we should be concerned that
excessive attachment to same-age companions could hamper a child's developing
better ways to think about both social and mental activities—and I don’t know
of any good evidence that age-graded classes contribute much to healthy social
relationships.

As for those “carefree” aspects of childhood, we need to examine
what might be involved when children engage in what we call “play.”Adults often assume implicitly that
there is a basic opposition in which Work is seen as ‘serious’ (and often
coupled to discomfort and pain), whereas Play is seen as ‘frivolous’ (and
mainly connected to pleasure and “fun”).But when we look more closely at Play, we see that it
often involves extreme degrees of focus, intensity, and discovery—so much that
many of us might recognize, in retrospect, that never since our childhoods have
we ever made ourselves Work so hard!

In any case, we all can agree that a parent who is choosing a
school should try to assess its teachers and its curriculum, as well as its
physical facilities.However, it
is also important to ensure that the school’s age-peer culture respects
learning, discussion, and understanding, and is not dominated by terror of
bullies, or contempt for the kids who the “in-groups” depict with impertinent
terms like “geek,” “nerd,” or “intellectual.”

Another problem with classroom-based schooling is that it requires
a synchronized schedule: each activity must be constrained to some prearranged
‘period’ of time, after which each child is forced to switch to some different
subject or topic.This may be
efficient for a management, but surely is not the most effective way to develop
each child’s abilities—or those of the people who teach them.

Those time-limited periods are sometimes justified by assuming
that most children have short “attention spans,” but I don’t see any sound
basis for this.Indeed when
unlimited time is available, children sometimes show degrees of persistence
that rival those of adult professionals—especially when pursuing what we call
“hobbies.”But when does a child
get the time to pursue an idea for as long as it needs?John Taylor Gatto discusses this in Dumbing
Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling (1992):
(This was written before the advent of iPods and video games.)

“Two institutions at present control
our children's lives: television and schooling, in that order. In centuries
past, the time of childhood and adolescence would have been occupied in real
work, real charity, real adventures, and the realistic search for mentors who
might teach what you really wanted to learn. A great deal of time was spent in
community pursuits, practicing affection, meeting and studying every level of
the community, learning how to make a home, and dozens of other tasks necessary
to becoming a whole man or woman.

“Out of the 168 hours in each week my
children sleep 56. That leaves them 112 hours a week out of which to fashion a
self. According to recent reports, children watch 55 hours of television a
week. That then leaves them 57 hours a week in which to grow up.

“My children attend school 30 hours a
week, use about 8 hours getting ready for and traveling to and from school, and
spend an average of 7 hours a week in homework - a total of 45 hours. During
that time they have no private time or private space [except for only] 12 hours
a week.”

I suspect that there may be important variations in how
people manage their “working memories.” To see what I mean, contrast these two
descriptions of how a person works out an idea:

Student 1: Whenever I get a good idea, I need to work on it
right away—because, if anything interrupts my thoughts, that new concept may
quickly fade away.So, most of my
accomplishments have come from setting everything else aside, to work on my
latest new idea for several hours immediately after conceiving it. Accordingly,
when attending a lecture, I always try to sit close to an exit—so that if the
speaker says something interesting, I can escape to contemplate it.

Student 2.I don’t
much mind interruptions because I’m always multitasking anyway.In fact, I don’t like thinking about
anything for more than about a minute or two, but I don’t mind switching a lot
between ideas because I don’t have trouble with getting back.

I can’t recall any research on this, but surely someone has
studied it.In any case, I have
the impression that some people can develop ideas during many separate
intervals—whereas others require longer, unbroken spans of time.If so, then we need to make (and test)
theories about what could account for differences in their abilities to recreate
a previous mental process or state after an interruption or change of subject.

This might also relate to the extent to which different
people can take and use notes. Some teachers insist that their students take
notes—and even require pupils to hand them in for grading.

Student 1. I learn a lot from taking
notes, because otherwise I can’t remember much from a lecture.However, just writing a few words from
time to time is enough to help me reconstruct a lot of what was talked about.

Student 2. I can scarcely take notes
at all because it is such a strain to condense what the teacher just said that
I miss everything he said after that.In fact if I keep taking notes, then later I can barely remember the
lecture at all!

Here again, we see individual differences; some students can
postpone reflective thinking by taking notes, but this doesn’t work well for
others because their notes don’t help them enough to reconstruct the relevant
mental processes.

I’m sure that children vary greatly in their abilities to recreate
previous mental states, and surely this has a huge effect on how those
different children learn because it will affect how they make their Credit
Assignments.I don’t have room
to explain this here, so look at Section 8-5 of The Emotion Machine.The
essential point of efficient learning is that, after you have solved a problem,
it is not enough just to remember the answer: you need to remember the
strategies that you used to discover that answer.Allen Newell pointed this out in his seminal paper on how to
make a smart chess-playing machine.

Allen Newell 1955: "It is extremely doubtful
whether there is enough information in "win, lose or draw," when
referred to the whole play of the game [so, for learning to be effective], each
play of the game must yield much more information. …If a goal is achieved, its subgoals are
reinforced; if not they are inhibited. … Every tactic that is created provides
information about the success or failure of tactic search rules; every
opponent's action provides information about success or failure of likelihood
inferences and so on.”

I
should note that we still don’t have learning programs that work this way,
perhaps because most research on learning machines has emphasized statistical
inference rather than reasoning. In any case, all this suggests that
clock-based classes would not be good for those who can’t tolerate
interruptions.

There is no such thing as a “typical child” because
each individual person’s brain contains many different kinds of resources —and
when different combinations of these are active, this can result in many
different “Ways to Think.”Thus
each child develops different ways to represent various kinds of knowledge and
skills—so for particular child, there will be some situations or activities at
which that child might become more (or less) competent than some other children
would.But because we don’t know
very much about how all those resources are organized, we tend to use vague
words like “think” and“learn” for
many kinds of processes.(See Chapters 7 and 9 of The Emotion Machine for more ideas about those processes.)In any case, each roomful of children
will contain ones who tend to learn in different ways.

Some
children do well by beginning with abstractions and “top-down” descriptions.

Others
prefer to start with examples, and then to generalize them.

Some
do better with brief intervals of study; others do better when they can spend
hours.

Some
learn best from verbal descriptions; others gain more from with graphical
pictures.

Others
learn best from reading texts, while others prefer to listen to lectures.

Yet
others learn more from manual and tactile interactions with physical materials.

Some
children prosper with many easy problems; others thrive on fewer but harder
ones.

Perhaps
some children learn more from success, while others learn more from their
failures. I don’t know of any hard evidence for this; however among
mathematicians it’s widely agreed that that one learns less from seeing
examples of things than from studying counterexamples of things.

Most children have individual
interests—hobbies, pastimes, and even obsessions—which may not be seen by their
teachers as unrelated to the standard
curriculum.Yet each person will
eventually, need to find some profession or job in society—and while most
people do find useful roles, quite a few end up with nothing to do, and this
can be tragic or dangerous.” This suggests that we should take care not to
classify a child’s ‘peculiar special interest‘ as being an eccentricity that
interferes with that child’s “normal” progression toward a “general education. Instead, in many instances, it might be better to recognize
and encourage those individualistic preoccupations.I’ll return to this in a later memo on
“project-based” learning and education.”

More generally, children develop at different rates, and each one
learns in different ways—so when you put many students in the same room and try
to teach the same things to all of them, some will flourish while others get
stressed, and some forge ahead while others get lost.Whatever it is that we want to teach, it is hard to design
an age-based curriculum that suits the needs of pupils with different
abilities.

In older times, this problem was recognized—and many pupils were
“skipped” a full year or two whenever this seemed appropriate. A famous
mathematician I know attributes much of his success to being skipped from Grade
3 to Grade 8.Today this is
politically unpopular, but in larger schools, “advanced placement” is still
permissible—but only for a particular subject, not for an entire school year.)

Socialization

It is often assumed that interacting with other children
helps social development more than associating with adults.But it might well be quite the other
way around.In any case, any method of raising children will have
consequences on the children's eventual development, and this includes decisions
about how we influence our children’s selections of other children or adults as
friends.For whatever one
does, it will have an effect, and inaction does not avoid one’s responsibility
for the outcome.The trouble is we
still know so little about how children develop that we can’t see what we are
responsible for.In particular, we
need to know a great deal more about how age differences in friendship
influence children's intellectual and social development—and especially about
the extent to which this involves various kinds of tradeoffs. (This paragraph
paraphrases some remarks by Curt Adams.)

In any case, this discussion is incomplete.What are plausible alternatives to age-based classes?How should such a project like OLPC
relate to existing public, private and home-based schools? Where do Montessori
ideas fit in? What kinds of projects are best accomplished by individuals,
pairs, or larger groups?What
other issues are involved with linking younger and older pupils?For example, how can we exploit
the fact that many high-school aged “computer hackers” know more than their
teachers do about computers and programming.We still have many more questions than answers.